Ask HN: Is anyone else losing friends in droves?
Hopefully not directly from the pandemic.
During the Facebook debacle last week, a fair number of my friends have publicly supported interests that seem directly opposed to my safety.
Is anyone else experiencing pressure to defend their values harder than ever, to the point of conversation deadlock?
It used to be a lot easier to maintain a diverse group of friends, so I'm curious about any of your experiences through times like these.
How do you stay creative, balanced, cope with lots of change, ...
thank you.
83 comments
[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 781 ms ] threadIf now someone coughs in my face, without a mask, which has happened. not sure if I should write them in my will. Because they may not have my security in their best interest.
I can't understand what you are hinting at here, or why it's related to FB. Maybe I'm out of the loop.
But in my experience, the majority of people don't religiously post on social media and have moderate views on most things. So extreme people on all sides are not representative of most people.
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.
Regarding the wisdom, I generally start with a null hypothesis that anything I can physically do with my body (which includes words produced by my mouth or my fingertips) is in the latter category, and everything else is in the former until I have overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
But anyways, I can relate a little. My sister has never been an activist type, never said anything about racial justice, until a week ago when she started posting BLM content on Facebook with a demand that anyone who disagrees should go ahead and unfriend her now. It was a shockingly abrupt change.
Count me in. And I'm not even in the US.
The thing is, the currently unfolding events are about Black Lives and the systemic discrimination and criminalization of black people in the US. But are about democracy too, and by a lot. And this is important considering how much influent the USA are on other nations.
Over the last two weeks we started seeing the US military (police corps and national guards) open fire agains its own military, repressing dissent and targeting journalists specifically. We have seen racial discrimination in clear sight, police brutality and police representatives unable to admit fault even with footage. We've seen cops planting bricks to charge protestors. We've seen police telling white dudes armed but not protesting to stay inside so that it doesn't look like they're playing favourites.
We've seen the police shoot the medics: that's war crime, for christ's sake.
As an italian, this reminds me A FUCKING LOT of the history pages about the rising of fascism in Italy.
I genuinely believe that the USA are becoming a fascist country, and that the outcome of these protests and the election in november will definitively declare what kind of nation the USA are.
I'm not asking people to unfriend me because I'm not on facebook. But I feel a lot more the need to do something instead of the usual nothing about world politics.
TL;DR: the current events are crazier than have ever been, and immensely scary.
I'm constantly censuring myself already, and only speak when I know what I'm talking about. Someone said talk is cheap but that's not true for everybody.
Words might be cheap, but getting them out...that's expensive if you happen to be an introvert.
For instance the riots have now killed more people than unarmed blacks killed by the US police last year. They've been attacking statues of Abraham Lincoln, who fought a war to end slavery. That doesn't look like the work of anti-racists.
So whose lists of talking points wins?
BTW "if Trump wins we're a fascist dictatorship" was a talking point tried in the last election too. He won and so far he's been rather the model of federalism, surprisingly so given the hype. For a supposed fascist he's remarkably content to delegate power to regional governors.
Do you have data to back that claim up ?
Now go to the Wikipedia article for "George Floyd protests", it has a section titled Deaths with list of killings related to the riots. It says:
"As of June 8, 2020, at least 22 people have died during the protests, with 19 due to gunshot wounds"
Or anti protesters / protesters?
I’m Confused so many decisive issues to deal with
Go get researched up on the psychology behind it, there are some good posts here with links, and good stuff from couple years back. You won't be able to change their minds with logic or facts
Lotsa people being red-pilled these days...
Of course, ideas that lead to policy matter in the aggregate. But I don’t think it’s productive to “lose friends” because their policy preferences, if adopted, through some long and attenuated causal chain might be contrary to your personal interests. Over the last year, I’ve become deeply concerned about the ideas espoused by many of my friends. I’m an immigrant to this country and for the most part love it for what it is. I think many of the notions my Facebook friends subscribe to will in the long term change the country for the worse, and lead to a worse future for my children. Indeed, it wouldn’t be historically unprecedented for these ideas, if taken too far, to lead to real suffering and physical harm to many people. But I know these people and I’m convinced they hold all of their beliefs in good faith. I’m not going to hold it against them that I think that the policies they support may be wrong or even harmful in the long run.
Why would you do this?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The sun will rise again tomorrow.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/phone-addiction-formula/
I'm sure they feel the same about me and my left(ish) posts.
I don't know how people can be anti-BLM .... How can I be friends with them?
https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
It's not very well formatted, but you can skip about half-way down and look for text that seems like a list.
We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
I don't think this is entailed in the general idea of supporting black people and equal rights.
There are plenty of other goals on that page that are similarly not obviously entailed.
Personally, I would doubt whether many of the people endorsing the position that black lives matter are even aware that an entity controlling this domain name is stating these positions, let alone that they concur with all of them.
Edit: "racial justice" would have been a better choice than "equity".
Equity means striving for an impossible, ever moving goalpost that will lead to oppression of many over time.
Equality of opportunity may not overcome the starting point, but doesn't seek to raise some and oppress others for actions that they didn't create.
Nobody should have to suffer, apologize or have their actions dismissed because of how they were born. We are all raised in different environments and all have to make our own decisions in life.
Our best option is to spread knowledge and points of ethical example.
People should read both MLK and Malcom-X and consider them before trying to raise a PoV about status quo vs change that may actually be worse for everyone. I'm not entirely in favor of the status quo, but that doesn't mean that changes proposed have any more value in terms of improving society as a whole.
Using #DefundThePolice as an example... it seems obvious that something needs done but https://blacklivesmatter.com/defundthepolice/ doesn't make a convincing case about. There are a lot of people who are opposed to the status quo but don't see much value in that particular hashtag. Does that seem anti-BLM to you?
You didn't "lose" (passive voice) friends, you actively decided to not be friends with them. That's on you, not them.
> I don't know how people can be anti-BLM .... How can I be friends with them?
You could try to understand why they express the views that they do. Presumably they aren't full of hatred, or you probably wouldn't be friends in the first place, which means they probably have a reasonable view, even if you disagree. The more your friends have to agree with you on everything to be friends, the fewer friends you'll have. Personally I think that shared interests and values and ability to have healthy conflict are more important than agreement. Plus, you'll grow more as a person if you don't live in an echo chamber.
a) Take a step back and ask yourself how much your safety is really being threatened by others' opinions on these matters. Also, as an exercise, consider the degree of un-safety that millions have been experiencing for many years which resulted in the current conflict. Even if you don't agree with your friends' conclusions, I'd bet you can at least sympathize with the root of the issue.
b) Relationships are maintained through tolerance. I maintain a good relationship with my parents despite having a polar-opposite political viewpoint, by putting what I know of them as people ahead of the words of their professed, abstract ideology. The two are not the same thing. Leaving some wiggle-room there is key to reducing conflict, which is key to maintaining lasting relationships. You have to be able to agree to disagree sometimes.
If the friend is saying "My uncle is a cop who's never done anything wrong and he doesn't deserve to be lumped in with the ones causing trouble", I could actively sympathize with that.
If the friend is saying "I still think it's only a few bad cops and that the protesters are causing more trouble overall than the cops", I would tend to think that person was misinformed and maybe try to share new information with them if I thought it would make a difference, but I would also leave it be if I had to for the sake of the friendship (this is my situation with my parents).
If the friend is saying "Strong-man governments are great, people should bow down and stop trying to hold the police accountable, they shouldn't have to be accountable to anybody", then that would tell me something about the person's moral center and I don't see myself wanting to remain friends with that kind of person at all.
Have you have ever been held up by a corrupt officer? One that is not wearing a badge or uniform. Or one that can be bribed? Acceptable, only outside of American police jurisdiction.
Inside America, the law ought to keep you safe. Cherish your institutions, enforce the law.
Do stop injustice and discrimination. The law should not speak about race.
Which in the most populous areas is passé anyway. Cities are mixed. If you look at any photo of the protests, you'll see voters from all walks of life.
You won't see the >75 population protesting. But they might be on facebook, some of them.
Perhaps like your parents. I wish you all love and understanding.
Unfortunately for them however, among the most successful facebookers are populists. That's what the algorithm stimulated.
The loud voices that want to burn the American Dream down to the ground, worldwide.
We'll see less of it for a while, but humans are stronger than bots, and facebook is not going to resist making bn's.
Just break up the damn corporation.
These days, generally only the people to my "right" seem like this. It's rare to be able to talk long with someone to my "left" without them becoming offended. That seems particularly unusual, as I've been pretty far to the left my entire life.
It's tempting to look at the 2016 election as the cause, but I started really noticing this about a year before that.
We're literally under attack, and these divisions are the result. For example, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- while controlled by Republicans -- concluded that driving factions of the U.S. ideologically apart is a chief aim of Russia's social media efforts. See pages 20-22 of Volume 2 of the 2019 Report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns:
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
Specifically, the Republican Senate concluded that Russia's aim is to erode trust in the media, drive polarization, feed information that drives support for all political extremes (far-left, far-right, and other), and "exploit societal divisions that already exist, rather than attempt to create new ruptures." They also want to "bait[] governments to respond in a heavy-handed or improper fashion that is irreconcilable with the nation's principles and civil liberties."
It's working.
The broad "bot" concept could be in play, but people are so cheap that I suspect it's funded humans instead. There does seem to be something amplifying our tendencies towards polarization.
Thirty years ago, if someone had a wacky set of ideas, people would point and laugh. These days, they're relatively more likely to clubbed into submission, forced into a struggle session, or just cancelled completely.
As far as NYT and WaPo, they are not "fake news" in the sense I was talking about. Nor is Fox, Breitbart, OANN etc. I'm talking about sites that are set up for people to imitate news organizations and spread made up but super polarizing content, often about race, religion, abortion, guns, immigration -- anything that divides people. That content then pings around on social media and helps amps up the polarization to incredible levels.
That pretty much describes journalism these days.
We can even trace its evolution because it's not that old.
Before the Trump election campaign, Russia wasn't being talked about much. The sudden spike in Russia/bot/fake news etc related conspiracies aligns exactly with Trump winning and the American left going into a sort of meltdown as they tried to explain why their candidate didn't flatten him. "Fake news" started as an attack on Trump which he then co-opted because the American right had been complaining about biased media for a lot longer than the left, so it was easy for him to do so as the base was already primed.
We can even spot the moment at which the conspiracy changed from being "Russians want to get Trump elected" to "Russians want to sow generic discord". It was the moment Facebook revealed the list of adverts purchased by Russians during the election campaign, and it turned out that it was a total mix of ads for both sides! The ads weren't all for Trump at all, which was inexplicable given the claims up to that point. (actually a simple explanation is that the FB analysis was just selecting random false positives rather than shadowy Russian operators as they believed).
So overnight true believers changed their beliefs to be "Russians want us to fight each other" which is ridiculous, because American politics has been famously divided and divisive for years. Like with George W Bush, who is apparently redeemed now, but I remember when he was supposedly just as bad as Trump is considered today. Why would anyone waste money on trying to create something Americans do just fine creating themselves?
someone who is comfortable harming a friend is not being a friend. if you've told someone that they're harming you, and they won't change at the very least for the simple reason that _you're friends_...
maybe they used to be good friends and things changed, or maybe these weren't good friends to begin with. either way, now is a good time to make new friends.
best of luck. it's tough, especially during lockdown when it's harder to connect over shared interests in the real world, but it's very worthwhile.
in conclusion: real friends can have productive conflict that doesn't ignore the core respect and concern each person has for the other's wellbeing. you deserve real friends.
Can you elaborate?
Talk is cheap, so people say (passionately) things with virtually no thought. Wait to see what people do and decide whether it's a _direct_ threat. If there's a 7 step chain of causation that's threatening, then you should relax and acknowledge you're probably wrong. The other part is you should make sure your actions directly align with your values.
Don't be this guy: https://xkcd.com/386/
Surprising similar strategies: pick an ideal target state; get buy-in from stake holders (fellow engineers or business people); come up with a multi-step plan with milestones; get started. If the milestones aren't getting completed and the target isn't measurably closer, you have a problem.
Rewriting the code over the weekend doesn't work. Using positional power to decree changes doesn't work either. Well, if either of those work then it wasn't that serious of a change anyway.
Regardless, my personal choice for one would be technology.
That this seemed necessary at all is itself sufficient to describe where we are.
It is not necessary. Please don't exaggerate.
Lockdowns: you fully support lockdowns or you want a hair cut or to murder my grandma. No room for any other interpretation or asking of questions.
Protests: you are literally a racist if you are not actively anti-racist. No room for other interpretations or asking of questions. Do not try to distract from the core message by talking about looting or rioting.
Politics: either you want to remove Trump from office or you are a racist or otherwise a terrible person. No room for other interpretation.
De-funding the police: you are a racist or a fascist and support police brutality or you want police removed from normal public interaction. Again, no room for a different interpretation or dialog.
I feel the problem is polarized politics and lack of room for dialog. Also, as a white male, my thoughts are not wanted nor valid. To the point that I feel I have to post with a throwaway since I've already have folks I thought were friends and have known me for years question if I am a racist because I don't support looting/rioting.
BTW: `Do not try to distract from the core message by talking about looting or rioting.`
I'm pro-protest every time there is one, even dumb ones like Civitas or others. Riots and looting and what's destroyed are the most interesting thing to understand. Yellow vest in France destroyed expensive and electric cars, bus stops, Velib stations. Anti-capitalists Black blocs destroyed Mcdonald's and banks. BLM destroyed small stores, community infrastructure... This is saying a lot about how they see themselves and who they're against. Do you think the same?
People tend to be tribalist in nature, you tend to lean into a group and that/those groups become your identity instead of striving to take things as an individual and respecting people as individuals.
We are all allowed to have our own opinions and perspective, and even discuss and debate their value vigorously. Where we tend to falter is when we lose respect for the people who are expressing opinions that we disagree with.
It's generally a combination of pedantry, anger, ignorance and disrespect for ourselves and others that leads to action in those baser instincts and reject "the other." In the end, we are worse off for it. It often feels like general discourse has been set back over a century in the past decade alone.
I try to concentrate on admirable personality traits in terms of those I would deem to support vs not about on level with policy opinions. Arrogance, corruption and hypocrisy are the big ones for me, short of that I'm willing to put up with just about everyone.
So I'd definitely agree that no matter who I'm talking to - liberal or conservative friends - they're assuming I'm left or right wing (the opposite of whatever they are).
People have every privilege to be an asshole so long as they aren't infringing on another's rights. But they all seem to want to infringe on other's rights.
Whilst I dislike the term, I think life is too short to spend time with people who take themselves and their opinions too seriously. I want spend more time laughing and less time debating.
I mostly don't care about my friends points of view. The only question you should ask them is : why do you think that, and the only question you should ask yourself is the same one. Unless you're really, really well informed, your point of won't be that interesting anyway. Interesting enough to post it on reddit or HN at most :)
If the conversation becomes to much for people feelings, take a tangent, talk about interesting philosophical point. Bias analysis is great too (check your own bias loudly to encourage people to do the same, it works). Do not hesitate to point that an argument is poor, especially if it comfort your views.
2. Not everything is about you. Your friends explicitly were not thinking about you when they picked a side.
3. You won't be convinced, but someone else may benefit from a tool I've used to get past this. Would you hold the same beliefs if you were born black in an inner city? Would you want the status quo in terms of police strategies? To be scared for your life at every traffic stop? It's easy to defend a stance from a position of privilege (directly opposed to "my safety".)
You can do the same for your friends with different political beliefs - most stances are based on someone's life experiences or environment. There's likely a reason they believe something, and it has nothing to do with you. If you grew up in their situation, or friends, or life experiences, do you think you'd still hold your same beliefs? Most of the time the answer for me is no, and therefore the beliefs have nothing to do with the person's character.
What is the definition of friend, if yours don't think of you when deciding to reallocate a quarter billion dollars?
I think there are no sides to this conflict. The system is in conflict with itself, and we're barely able to control it at this point.
Our secret is that we don't let it reduce our respect for one another, at the end of the evening we're always shaking hands and agreeing to meet again next week. It may also help that when we became friends we worked together, so we forged a bond of mutual respect through our work.
I have another friend who is a real SJW snowflake type (he got hired by Google, perhaps that explains it, he wasn't like that before). With him I don't tend to debate politics much because he gets genuinely upset. But we've also always come back and been friends again afterwards, and I've noticed he's sometimes gone off and researched whatever I was saying for himself and has questions. So obviously parts of it sunk in.
I think Facebook can be difficult because your default mental state is that all those people are "friends" even if maybe you haven't seen them for a while, or if your friendships have very different depths. The term friend is very black and white. Most people only have a tiny number of really deep friendships, often only one or two at most, I mean of the sort built on real long term knowledge of each other and which can survive genuine disagreement over divisive issues. You say "a fair number of my friends" which sounds like many of them probably aren't deep friends. They're probably more like friendships that were once deep, or who were party buddies, or who were former colleagues that you got along with etc. For them you'd probably be surprised to discover that if you started hanging out with them regularly for some reason, they'd get over it and you'd be OK.